 All right. Well, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the afternoon portion of the 2023 Archives Fair. For those of you who are not here this morning, my name is John Lecloak. I'm the vice president of the National Archives Assembly. I just wanted to give a brief introduction for the afternoon session. We're going to have some brief remarks from the archivist of the United States, Dr. Colleen Shogun. And following those remarks, we will have two, three session blocks in the afternoon. We'll have a session on a new exhibition at the Kennedy Center. And then there will be a session on social justice and engaging with marginalized communities at the University of District of Columbia. And then we will conclude our day's sessions with an informal feedback session with myself and my co-organizer of the Archives Fair, where we will listen to all of you and hear for what we did and what we could have done better for this year's Archives Fair. So, and without any further ado, I'm going to introduce the president of the National Archives Assembly, Keith Owens, who will introduce the archivist of the United States. We are really hoping that you are all watered and fed very well during lunch. And it is my honor and pleasure to introduce to you the 11th archivist of the United States. Dr. Colleen Shogun became the 11th archivist of the United States in May of 2023. On August 3rd of 2022, President Joe R. Biden nominated Dr. Colleen Shogun to be the archivist of the United States. The U.S. Senate, Senate, need to get this closer. Senate confirmed Dr. Shogun on May 10th of 2023 and she was sworn in as the 11th archivist of the United States on May 17th, 2023. Most recently, Dr. Shogun served as Senior Vice President and Director of the David M. Rubenstein Center for the White House Historical Association. She previously worked in the United States Senate and as a senior executive at the Library of Congress. Dr. Shogun was the Vice Chairman of the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission and the Chair of the Board of Directors at the Women's Suffrage National Monument Foundation. She taught at Georgetown University in the government department and moderated seminars for the Aspen Institute. She is a previous President of the National Capital Area Political Science Association and served on the American Political Science Association Council, the governing body for this organization. Her research focuses on the American Presidency, Presidential Rhetoric, Women in Politics and Congress. A native of the Pittsburgh area, Dr. Shogun holds a B.A. in Political Science from Boston College and a Ph.D. in American Politics from Yale University, where she was a National Science Foundational Graduate Fellow. She is a member of the Pi Beta Kappa, the Order of the Cross and Crown, and Washington D.C. Literary Society, not to mention the newest member of the National Archive Assembly. It is my great pleasure and honor to introduce to you all the 11th Archivist of the United States, Dr. Colleen Shogun. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for that kind introduction and everyone happy American Archives Month, so I hope you're celebrating. Every October, of course, we take the month to celebrate archives and share knowledge with each other and talk about public awareness about the importance of archives and the people who preserve and work in archives every day and manage them. And the D.C. Archives, fair as I understand it, although, as Keith said, this is obviously my first time attending this event, brings together a whole wide range of archives professionals from around this larger D.C. region to be able to talk about and discuss what your institutions are doing, what you're accomplishing, what your challenges might be, and hopefully be able to learn about some best practices across organizations and institutions. So we're very happy to be able to host this Archives Fair here at the National Archives. And once again, as I understand it, this is the first one that we've been able to host in several years due to the pandemic. So it's a great accomplishment that we're even here in 2023 and we look forward to many more to come. So I do want to recognize our organizers of today's fair. Of course, you just heard from Keith Owens, who is a preservation specialist at our National Personnel Record Center in St. Louis and also president of the National Archives Assembly. So thank you for everything that you do here to help organize this, but also for your work at NPRC, which helps serve our civilian employees and our nation's veterans, a really important component of our mission here at the National Archives. And John Ligloic, which you heard previously before Keith, an archivist in our Electronic Records Reference Branch, and also the vice president of the National Archives Assembly. And then also Leigh Jelenella, is that right? I'm sorry if I mispronounced your last name. A digital archivist with the Smithsonian American History Museum. She represents the Smithsonian Institution Archives and also the Special Collections Council. So thank you for everything that you do. Thank you particularly for Keith. We're flying in overnight and I understand you're flying back later today. So thank you for doing that. Here in D.C. we are very, very lucky. We have such a wide array of cultural institutions that are rich with our archival collections just in the city in Washington, D.C. It really does make this fair possible. And that's not the case necessarily in every city that you go to across the United States, but we have that opportunity to do that here in Washington, D.C. And if we have a little bit of time after I speak here and chat with you, I'm going to go out and look at some of the exhibits and booths that we have out there. Really as I look at the list of the participating institutions, I'm very excited to see what you have to offer and what you have to share. I won't say that, you know, I've said this in many different venues, but I repeat it over and over again that as the archivist of the United States, access is my top priority. And in all walks, access can mean obviously access in the conventional sense, access to our collections in person. And thank goodness we're able to do that now after the pandemic to have that in person connection with our collections. And we want to welcome at the National Archives as many people as possible to be able to connect with our collections in person. That might be coming into one of our research facilities to be able to view those aspects of our collection or records in our collection firsthand. But it also can be visiting this building and looking at our museum and visiting our museum so you can view a representation of the records, a representative, of course, of American history. And then another aspect that we're going to be working on is being able to access as many records online and digitally as possible. And we do this because it is an access issue. Whereas we open our doors and we would like to have as many Americans as possible come visit us here at the National Archives, we know that not everyone is able to do so, not able to even travel here to Washington, D.C. or any of our other 41 facilities across the nation. So we find that providing our records online at our catalog is a form of access digitally to be a way that we can reach millions of more of Americans. So we're very focused on that. We're also focused on, a lot of people ask me this, why? Why archives? And maybe not people from the archival profession itself. But, you know, people that I meet when I'm out and about or when I'm talking at dinners or other things that I attend, receptions in Washington, D.C. or out across the country. So why archives? Why do we have to have a physical location? Why isn't everything online? Or also, what's the purpose of an archive? And I think, you know, two things for me that really resonate is democracy and history. And those are two things that I like to talk about when I talk about the purpose of archives. From my introduction, you know that I'm not an archivist by training. That's not my profession. I'm a political scientist by training. But that gives me a lot of confidence to be able to say that one of the big reasons, one of the reasons that I get up in the morning, I'm really excited about coming to work at the National Archives, is I view it as a keystone in our democracy and the continuing vitality of our democracy. One, if you read any, you know, political theorist or anybody who writes about democracies in general, not only in the United States but across the world, they will tell you that one of the key ingredients for the perpetuation of a democracy is accountability. And there is literally no way to have accountability in a democracy historically without having access to the nation's records. And the National Archives, of course, is the repository of our nation's records. So we are a key ingredient in this institution for the continuation of the vitality of democracy. And all of you who work in archival institutions and facilities related to cultural institutions and other fine organizations across Washington, D.C., that's the same with you as well. So I find this to be a really important point. It's kind of a simple point, but it's worth reiterating over and over again. And then secondly, you know, of course the importance of history, understanding the historical record, making sure that the historical record cannot be forgotten. And that's something that we do here at the archives as well for, of course, professionals that come in for all kinds of reasons for scholarly research or maybe they're writing a play or something else in the creative realm. We want to serve them. We also have a responsibility, and I feel this very strongly, to provide an access to the best history education we can to our nation's children. And we know that the pandemic has been very hard in this in this regard to our nation's children because we've gotten the scores, unfortunately. And we know that the scores are down in areas of American history and in civics. And that's something here at the National Archives we can help with, but you can also help with across your institutions to be able to bolster that interest in American history and foster that amongst our nation's kids. So all of this work is worthy of recognition and of thanks. And that's part of what we do also in American archives this month to celebrate American archives. So this fair is a small way for us to champion what you do on a daily basis. And I hope you found it valuable to see what other institutions are doing and also being able to chat amongst each other, to learn from each other, and also sometimes not feel so alone because you might think, oh, you know, some of these, I know some of your organizations might be smaller than the National Archives. And you may feel like, oh, nobody else has this problem. But coming together in a professional setting like this, coming together communally always enables you to find out that you're not alone. And there are other archivists and other organizations that maybe have solutions that they're willing to share with you, that either were successful or maybe not successful. And I hope that you were able to do that today and be able to enjoy that for the rest of your day here at the National Archives. So I want to go out and take a look at the fair, but I'm happy to answer some questions for a few minutes. If you have any for me, I'm happy to, you know, I've been in the job for a little over five months, I think five months and one week, exactly. But I'm happy to answer questions about our directions here at the National Archives, what I see as challenges or anything, or any feedback that you might have that's on your mind. Thank you. If you do ask a question, just if you could say what your name is and where you're from, yes. Yes, I am, yes, I am first woman to be in this role permanently. There were women that served who were deputy archivists, including Deb Wall, who's the deputy archivist right now, who we know served for an entire year as acting archivist. There were women that served in that capacity, but not a woman to serve permanently in the role and be presently nominated and confirmed. Yes, it's incredibly important to me that I step into this role as the first woman. I take a great deal of pride in the fact that I'm the first woman. What I see a lot, whenever we had the Society for American Archivists, SAA came here this summer because their conference was in Washington, D.C. this summer. We invited everybody that attended that conference to come here one late afternoon and opened up this building so people could come and see our exhibits. And I gave some short remarks. And I had a long line of archivists actually to get pictures with me. And not everyone, but a large majority of those people in line were women. And what I heard time and time again when they came up to take a picture with me, a photo with me, was that really mattered to them. And I think that what you see in cultural institutions, whether it's archives or libraries or museums historically, although things are definitely changing, what you see is that a lot of those professions that work in those institutions, sometimes they're called GLAM, that work in those institutions are women, that are curators or archivists or librarians or museum experts, exhibits experts, historians, a lot of them public historians are women, but traditionally and historically, the people that run those organizations who are the president's CEOs or whatnot are usually not women. And so it's one of those interesting professions dominated by women, but unfortunately without a lot of leadership by women at the top of the echelon. And I've talked a lot with Carla Hayden about this, who was the first, I worked at the library when she came on board, first African American to serve in that role and first woman. But she felt very strongly about both. But she said what really what mattered a lot in the librarian profession was in fact that she was the first woman since so many librarians across the country are women, but typically didn't see women in those top positions, whether it was a public library or a state library or university library, whatever the case may be. And I suspect this is the same thing. Very similar in the archives profession. So I take that to heart. I'm glad I'm happy that I was be able to serve as the first woman. And I guarantee you I will not be the last. Yes. Okay. I mean, you can always reach out to my office or contact information is online. And if it was appropriate, that if it was a tour, it might be arranged out of my office, the archivist office, it depends on what you know, they're looking for something, you know, more of a professional interaction concerning the archival archival practices, then we would reach out to what would be most relevant here at the National Archives and try to arrange that. But certainly we're happy in my my office to be the conduit at least for the initial inquiry. And then we would find the relevant component within the very large National Archives structure to which to work with on on that matter. But absolutely, we're happy to do that. Yes. Right. Yeah. So it's a good question because just to give you a sense of what we're dealing with at the National Archives. Right now we have about 13 and a half billion records. I'm talking about paper, you know, or analog records, right, about 13 and a half billion is the number that I've been told to use that is it's an approximation, obviously, but we're pretty confident in in that general number. And a little over, I think about 250 million are online in the catalog. Okay, so it's a good I mean, that's that's a really impressive amount to be in our catalog online. But that's not, you know, 13.5 billion. Okay, so we have to make choices. Some people say, Oh, well, digitize it all, you know, you get those questions all the time. And you have to explain why that that would be very challenging just to start from the beginning and just go all the way through. It's much better to make some, some prioritization choices as you go along. One thing that we have done at the National Archives is prioritize records that have that are of great interest to previously underrepresented groups. And we work with some of those groups to help us to help identify for us, which records they would want to see digitized, which would be most helpful to them. I'm going to Seattle tomorrow, one of our National Archives facilities is in Seattle. And that is the place where we house all of our Alaska native records. Okay, previously, we're in Alaska, that facility closed. And so those records physically moved to Seattle. And now we are moving those records temporarily to to College Park, where we have a lot higher speed digitization capabilities to digitize those records, then they will go back to Seattle once they are digitized. But that's a good example of an underrepresented previously underrepresented group that has identified records that will be very useful to them. If they are available, available digitally. So that's one group. And then another group of records that we will, which would just sort of make sense that we would prioritize for digitization or high use records, so records that have wide interest to the American public, that can mean a lot of different things. You know, some of our presidential records at our presidential libraries, obviously have are of great interest. For example, and we would prioritize digitization of highly requested or highly used items so that more people can have access to them. Now there's there may be other criteria, but those are two groups. Okay, so I'm not saying that's the only groups, but those are there's an example there. Yes. Yes, yeah. I think it's through and the National Archives actually does a really good job of this. But it's it's all about getting our primary documents and this case for the National Archives records, getting them online digitized and providing the right contextual information so that teachers find it very easy if they are teaching a unit on World War Two that we have ready made records relevant to World War Two. For example, the other day I saw the amazing aerial flight map of actually the Japanese fighters coming in to Pearl Harbor and the person that was actually keeping track wasn't done digitally back then actually keeping track of the planes that were coming in. And then of course at a certain point of time realizing what had happened. But boy, you have a almost emotional reaction when you see that primary source document, you could study Pearl Harbor, you know, and read about it in the textbook and read about what happened that day as much as you want. When you see that record, when you see that come to life, you really get a sense of what was happening that day in Hawaii and the instigation of course for US entry into World War Two. So I think having interact that was an in-person interaction, but you could have that document on that record online so it can be brought up in a classroom. Hopefully, you know, the ability to be able to for kids to see that on their think pads right in front of them or have it in the front of a classroom that a teacher is able to refer to and tell that story. I think that's really important. I love like suffragists. I like the women's suffrage movement. But being able to tell the stories of those women, many of them who went to prison for, you know, considerable periods of time at a prison, you know, not too far down the road, 25 miles down 95, located now 95. It wasn't there when they were there. But, you know, be able to tell the stories of what, you know, what their backgrounds were and why they felt so strongly that women deserve the right to vote. That really will resonate with kids better than just saying, ah, the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. Okay. Yeah, that's factually correct. And it's not bad to tell, to have that factual information, but being able to tell those stories in an interesting way to have that almost emotional connection to the background will get kids I think interested in history. And we do do that at the National Archives and we want to do more of it. I think we do a terrific job with our substance. What we're trying to work on as much as possible is having the outreach to organizations like yours so that we have, for example, social studies teachers that when they're teaching a unit on a particular era, a particular moment in time in American history, they think, okay, let me look at the National Archives website and find out what I can, what they have available for me that I'm able to incorporate into my lesson plan as I go along. I have one more. Okay. Oh, uh-huh. Right. We have quite a bunch of stuff that will never be able to make thoroughly surgical. So my question for you is on a national scale, National Archives think of in terms of their collection, making a collection in terms of taking things in. Right. So we are a little bit different than some other, like for example, the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress, which, for example, the Library of Congress looks at books that come through copyright. Okay. Just for an example. And then they make selections for the books that are submitted for copyright about what will be part of its permanent collection at the Library of Congress. And they have librarians who are trained in subject matter expertise to be able to make selections like this book, definitely we want for the National Collection, maybe this one, for certain reasons, maybe not. Okay. But we are not in that way because we take in all of the permanent records of the government of the United States. So we work with the agencies, okay, all the federal agencies across the United States government on record schedules, which will help determine for how long records will be temporary records and which records will be temporary and which will become will become accessioned in permanent part of the National Archives. So we do have an entire, a really good division that works on federal records and it's accessioning and those record schedules which come up to me for final approval. So we are not making, it would say like choices about what we collect and what we don't because we are collecting all of the permanent records out of all the records that are made or created in the operations of the federal government. We take between one and three percent as a permanent record. So just to give you an idea and most of those records, they should reflect a large representation of what happens in an agency but a lot of them are focused on the decisions that are made to be able to operate that particular agency or program. Those are the ones we absolutely need to capture. So we have a little bit less discretion about what we accession and what we don't because our business is the records business and we take it in, you know, at that point in time when it is going to be a permanent record. Has that been a favor to your website? Right. Oh yeah, I mean it doesn't, a record, the National Archives maintains a record as a record as a record and the format does not determine the validity of whether or not you accession a record. It's the substance. But there has to be, you know, changes in practice as the formats have changed over time. There's no doubt about that. So text messages, social media, right, you know, these are very, very different types of accessioning than, you know, just taking in memos or pieces of paper or print photographs versus digital photographs, right? So all of those things change how they can be accession. But once again, a record is based upon the content of the record, not the media in which it was produced. Okay? Alright, well I'm going to go out and see all the tables. Thank you so much for joining us today and we look forward to seeing you next year. Thank you.